Canon launches new F500 flagship scanner

5 January 2005 15:40 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Canon has launched a new film capable scanner to its CanoScan range. The LiDE 500F will become the new flagship to the LiDE range and is capable of scanning film at a resolution of 2400x4800.

Ultra-thin (its 35mm thick) the scanner also comes with a number of shortcut buttons that allow you to do such things as scan directly to PDF format.
Powered by USB2.0, the scanner also has a zero warm up time and immediate nine-second preview function.

For photographers hoping to scan multiple images at the same time the scanner also has a Multi-Photo mode, which generates up to ten separate, individually indexed and automatically deskewed files from ten individual photos in a single pass.

A Film Adapter Unit (FAU) is integrated into the design of the scanner. The special holder facilitates scanning of 35mm negatives and positive film strips to create high-resolution 48 bit image files suitable for quality enlargements.

Film Automatic Retouching and Enhancement (FARE) Level 3 technology uses infrared light to identify and remove defects caused by dust and scratches on the surface of original transparencies.

The LiDE 500F has three additional features - fading correction, grain correction and backlight compensation. Fading correction ‘re-saturates' faded colours in old photographs, while the grain correction feature takes out the grain visible in scans of high-ASA film. Backlight compensation corrects underexposed areas in heavily backlit frames by adjusting the gamma only in the dark parts of the image, without washing out correctly exposed areas.
The CanoScan LiDE 500F will be available from March 2005 for £129 RRP inc VAT